In this talk, Anansa Benbow takes us back to the classroom – not for a lecture, but for an empathetic exploration of the invalidation of Black English that American schoolchildren face. Anansa is currently a second-year M.A student studying Applied Linguistics at Teachers College. She graduated from the University of Rochester with a B.A. in Linguistics in 2015. As an undergraduate, she was most interested in the linguistic connections between West African languages and liturgical languages used in African-based religions in Latin America. From 2015-2017, Anansa worked with middle school and high school students in Providence, RI through City Year, an AmeriCorps education non-profit. She used this time to explore the connections between education and linguistics. Her academic interests lie in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, phonetics & phonology, and psycholinguistics. Anansa is fueled by the power that language has in including and empowering others, particularly multilingual learners and speakers of African American English in the K-12 setting. She believes that nuances in communication are vital in humanizing, affirming, and validating our lives. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx